Tuesday, March 6, 2007

Today's Lesson in Grammar

Hello class. Welcome to your lesson in grammar for today. You all look well. Except for you, little Billy, you look a little pale.

Anyway, this is an ellipses: ...

I'll do that again. ...

See that? Three periods. Three periods, and only three periods. No more, no less. Three is the number of the periods, and the number of the periods is three. You shouldn't use two periods, unless directly using a third. Five periods is right out.

So please, for the love of Webster, use three periods. And use it in the proper context. It's used to denote a longer than usual pause. If it were a regular pause, a comma would suffice. If it's not for a pause at all, you've used it wrong, don't do that. It's not just netiquette, it's proper grammar.

Class dismissed. Billy, you should go to the nurse's office.

8 comments:

  1. and for your grammar lesson, shouldn't "nurses" be "nurse's" since it is a posessive word in context? lol, i am horrible at grammar.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Maybe it's more than one nurse?

    Though that would be nurses' office.

    You know, a guy corrected me once. Once.

    ReplyDelete
  3. You would know better than I sir.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks. I used to press the period button and dropped random amounts of it - didn't even know there was a rule. I will remember that I learned this from you.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi bart,
    I'm at that age in life where I'm running out of periods.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Ahahah, oh man, I set it up and you knocked it right the f' out of the park.

    Good one.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Thanks for the clarification. I use way too many!! (Is there a rule for exclamation points?)

    ReplyDelete
  8. Generally more than 3 is overkill.

    ReplyDelete

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